Well, when the Guardian, the Telegraph and even those arch-contrarians at Spiked Online are in agreement over something, some alarm bells should go off. So let's at least try to see if there might be another side to the story here.

The word "technocracy" comes from the Greek words "tekhne", meaning skill, and "kratos" meaning power. Technocrats thus literally promise to be "problem solvers" – politicians who make decisions based on their expertise or specialist knowledge of a particular subject, rather than to please a particular interest group or political party. The term is commonly attributed to the engineer William H Smyth of Berkely, California in 1919, though the idea that a country should be organised and spiritually led not by the church, feudal landowners or the military but by industrial chiefs and men of science, goes back to the early socialist thinker Saint-Simon.

Yes, there's no harm in saying it: technocracy once used to be a big idea for the international left. In 1930s America, for instance, it wasn't a term of abuse but the programme for a new social utopia. In the middle of the Great Depression, an emergent technocratic movement led by engineers and dissident economists such as Thorstein Veblen and Howard Scott proposed that populist politicians simply weren't capable to fix the system: "The maladministration and chaos imposed upon the industrial mechanism by arbitrary rule of extraneous interest has reached such a point that many technicians feel the urgent need of confederating their forces in a program of industrial co-ordination based, not on belief, but exact knowledge," thundered a pamphlet by the Technical Alliance.

The American technocratic movement was short-lived, not least because the flaws in its thinking were so apparent: their belief that anyone could ever be completely apolitical in their decision-making now strikes us as naive. No one remembers the technocrats' "Plan of Plenty", and everybody remembers Roosevelt's New Deal.

Over the course of the next few decades, technocracy got a dodgy rep. Veneration of industrial progress and unchecked rule by bureaucrats became a trademark of totalitarian regimes in Nazi Germany and Soviet Russia. George Orwell describes technocracy as a precursor to fascism. What was Adolf Eichmann if not a technocrat?

In many European countries, the word technocrat still has positive connotations. In the 1950s, Jean Monnet envisioned growth as something that required expertise rather than party politics. Smaller democracies, such as Holland, often rely on technocrats as negotiators between unruly coalition governments, or between employers and employees. Belgium, without a government for 17 months and counting, is a technocrat's paradise and has weathered the crisis fairly well so far. In the former communist states of central and eastern Europe, technocrats played a key role in negotiating the transition from authoritarian regime to democracy.

Kevin Featherstone, a professor in European politics at LSE, suggests that "there may well be fewer technocrats in power in Europe at the moment than there were through the 1990s". It's certainly nothing new in Italy, where Giuliano Amato, a law professor, was appointed prime minister after Italy's expulsion from the European Monetary System in 1992. Carlo Azeglio Ciampi, a former secretary general of Banca d'Italia, and economist Lamberto Dini, likewise, were never elected but appointed by the president to oversee reforms. The situation in Greece is different, but in Xenophon Zolotas it too had an unelected interim PM in 1989-90. Britain, where Labour only flirted briefly with technocracy in the 1960s, may well be the odd one out here.

Does that mean that technocracy is better than democracy? Of course not. But it might just be worth considering that a temporary technocrat rule may well be an acceptable – perhaps necessary – part of the democratic process at times of crisis. Would we prefer British healthcare to be run by technocrats (ie experts) rather than politicians and free-market ideologues? I think so. Would we be more confident in the judgment of British frontbenchers if most of them hadn't gone straight from university into politics? I think so.

"Engineers" may never be completely apolitical, but they may be less political than those who went into politics to become politicians. What if technocrats are just politicians without much charisma or without expensive PR? "Mediocrity in politics is not to be despised," the German writer (and EU-sceptic) Hans Magnus Enzensberger once wrote. "Greatness is not needed."

All this is not to say that all is well in the eurozone, not to deny that the EU is now nurturing an image problem on top of the financial woes, that Angela Merkel has done a woeful job at coming up with a credible plan for solving the crisis, and that Greece and Italy should call elections as soon as the sea is calmer. Most importantly, it is not to suggest that Britain shouldn't question the "more Europe" mantra. But it might just help to try and understand the way mainland Europe does politics differently before it rushes to offer advice.